Abstract
This study examines the activities and ideas of the Socialist Party of Texas in the opening decades of the twentieth century. As the proportion of farms worked by renters rather than owners grew alarmingly in a society still marked by the yeoman ideal, the party of Eugene Debs seized on the strong Texas tradition of agrarian revolt to build a formidable, if short-lived, Socialist movement in the Lone Star State. There were Socialist newspapers, unions, rural encampments, and a Socialist electorate that would deliver 25, 743 votes to Debs in the election of 1912. World War I and internal contradictions aggravated by a racist, fractious leadership pre-empted further Socialist organization. The party collapsed without achieving its goal of abolishing cotton tenancy, an accomplishment reserved for Roosevelt's New Deal.
Mellard, Jason Dean (2000). Lone Star Reds: the Socialist Party and cotton tenancy in Texas, 1901-1917. Master's thesis, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from
https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /ETD -TAMU -2000 -THESIS -M455.